In Every Generation - Pharoah

Stuart Grant, 2006

A few years
ago, when talking about the dismal state of world affairs, I would sometimes
quote a rather flippant phrase:

"It's not
that the world is any worse; it's just that the news coverage is better than
it used to be.

I don't use
that phrase any more. Because it seems quite clear to me, and I'm sure to
many of you, that the world is a very dangerous place.

The war in
Iraq has been dragging on now for three years, with no end in sight; Al quaeda
continues to constitute a serious threat to peace and security; tensions between
Israel and the Palestinians are as bad as ever.

My mind is
pretty much exercised by all these things. And I keep asking myself, What
has our Christian Faith, what has our Jewish Christian tradition to say about
these things?

What can
we do? How do we live in this beautiful but dangerous world?

People make
various responses:

- It's beyond
me;

- I don't
want to know about it; cancel the

newspaper;

- Leave it to the politicians;

- We're in New Zealand, and you can't get further

away from the trouble
spots of the world than

that. Lucky us.

Sorry. We
live in a global village. What happens in other parts of he world very definitely
affects us.

As I've said,
my mind is exercised by the dangerous dramas that are being enacted on the
world stage. And over the last few days I have been wondering how I might
find a way in to the subject so as to have something to share with you this
morning.

I found a
way in, - at the beginning of the Exodus story where we hear how

"a new
pharaoh arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.

The story
goes on:

2.

He said
to his people, "Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful
than we. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and,
in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from
the land.

Therefore
they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labour. They built
store cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh. But he more they were oppressed,
the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the
Israelites. The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites,
and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every
kind of field labour. They were ruthless in all the tasks they imposed on
them."

Losing
all that slave labour would be a huge economic loss to the Egyptian government.

So the only
response Pharaoh could think of was to make things really tough for the Israelites;
to make their lives an absolute misery; cow them into submission and so keep
control.

If you want
to remind yourselves about how things turned out, keep on reading the Exodus
story. Moses, the great leader, received his call from God to go to Pharaoh
and plead for the release of the Israelite slaves. Ten times Pharaoh agreed,
and ten times he went back on his word, with the result that the Egyptians
were afflicted with ten plagues. Finally, the Israelites escaped.

Whatever
we may make of the gruesome story of the plagues and the grim kind of God
that is presented, the Exodus story is the most pivotal story of the Hebrew
Scriptures. It shapes everything that follows.

We tend to
focus our attention on Moses and the Israelite slave people, naturally enough.

But this
morning I want to concentrate my attention on the other leading character,
Pharaoh.

Some time
ago I came across an article in "The Other Side, (a magazine sadly no longer
in production), by Arthur Waskow, an American Jewish Rabbi. The article is
entitled "In every generation, Pharaoh.

Once a year,
Waskow relates, Jewish people celebrate the Passover, retelling the story
and reinterpreting it. In the telling of the Passover story there are two
passages that begin,

"In every
generation.

3.

1. In every
generation, one arises to destroy us.

2. In every
generation, all human beings must see themselves as those who arise to go
forth from slavery to freedom."

In other
words, - In every generation, some new Pharaoh will appear, wanting to exercise
tight control and deadly power over us; a powerful individual or elite; an
institution.

And in every
generation, there are oppressed groups who need to work for more community,
more freedom, more justice.

The Pharaoh
who did not know Joseph is really a symbolic figure.

You don't
have to look far in history to find examples of Pharaoh.

Way back
in the memory of Christians and Jews is the Roman Empire, - the only super
power in the world 200 years ago.

The Romans
used their arrogant power to crucify Jesus. They tortured 10 of the greatest
Jewish rabbis to their deaths. Out of this misuse of power arose the new communities
of the Christian Church and Rabbinical Judaism.

In modern
times Pharaoh has taken various shapes: the British rulers in India trying
to suppress Gandhi, who was trying to lead his people to independence in a
non-violent way. Gandhi's way of non-violence has spread out through the world
since his time.

In South
Africa, Pharaoh was the Apartheid System.

In the U.S.A.
similarly, in the time of the struggle to end racial segregation - Pharaoh
took the form of fear driven control - lynch mobs, the Ku Klux Klan, church
bombings.

Professor
Geering sees the policies of the Israeli government towards the Palestinians
in much the same way. He quotes prominent Israelis

who have
tried and are still trying to warn their government against their disastrous
folly in trying to control the Palestinians. One of them predicts that the
government's policies could eventually spell the end of the state of Israel
and a catastrophe to the Jewish people.

I think we
can distinguish a pattern in the various examples I've given. Just like Pharaoh
in the Exodus story, those who exercise power and control in a brutal ways
bring about destruction and misery, not only for those they oppress, but for
themselves and their own peoples as well.

4.

You know
how we sometimes refer to the "Ifsof history? What if Napoleon had won the
battle of Waterloo, instead of the duke of Wellington, for example?

Similarly,
what if the Pharaoh "who did not know Josephhad behaved like the Pharaoh
who HAD known Joseph. So I looked up the relevant passage in Chapter 47 of
Genesis . . ..

"Pharaoh
said to Joseph: your father and your brothers have come to you. Settle your
father and your brothers in the best part of the land. Let them live in the
land of Goshen.

A generous
act, a compassionate act, (no doubt out of gratitude for what Joseph had done
for Egypt).

What if the
later Pharaoh had followed in that tradition? What if, instead of seeing the
Hebrews as a threat and a source of cheap labour, he had integrated them into
the wider community? There would have been no need for Moses, or the Exodus;
one of the "ifsof history.

But the later
Pharaoh didn't act like the earlier one. He stands as a symbol for oppression.
His fear of the Hebrews grew; he used ever more desperate measures to control
them. There was no hint of a compromise. In the end he became addicted to
control and power. This is how Arthur Waskow reads this Pharaoh. It wasn't
that he was consciously, deliberately evil. Alone, at the top, he became convinced
that his power was indispensable, and that he was right in all things.

Waskow goes
on: "If we seek to identify a pharaoh in our generation, we should not be
looking for deliberate evil. We should look instead for people or institutions
that hold such great power that they become convinced they are indispensable.
They are so isolated from critical comment and accountability that when they
meet it, they respond chiefly with stubbornness and anger.

The Pharaoh
whom Waskow identifies, the institution possessing the greatest power the
world has ever seen, is his own country, the U.S.A., together with the multinational
corporations that possess and use a similar kind of power.

Unless that
power is used benevolently, generously, as Joseph's Pharaoh used his power,
it could be very bad for the world.

9/11 brought
the world into a completely new situation.

5.

A group of
Muslims had become so consumed with hatred for the US and the West that they
dared to mount the attacks that proved that even the world's superpower was
vulnerable.

It is wishful
thinking in the extreme to wonder what might have happened if the US government
had stopped to ask the crucial question, "Why do they hate us so much? What
is the reason behind these attacks?"

That didn't
happen. Instead the predictable happened. War was declared on terrorism, without
asking the question, Why?

The vision
that has been missed is that of shaping a world where the aim is to have such
security, such dignity and fairness for all human beings, that terrorismhas nothing to feed on. Now, the argument
appears to be the awful, self-defeating one, "Violence is the only language
they understand."

Let's return
to the Exodus story. Remember how Moses went time after time to Pharaoh pleading
with him to let the Israelites go; release them from captivity; give them
their dignity.

Remember
how each time Pharaoh agreed to give up his control, he changed his mind;
there were ten plagues.

It makes
very strange reading, and presents a view of God that many of us feel very
uneasy about. I don't think we should take the plague stories literally, but
there is some foundation in fact. What seems to be clear is that the disasters
were the result of Pharaoh's oppressive actions against the Israelites.

Is it going
too far to suggest a parallel between the Pharaoh who did not know Joseph,
and the actions of today's great super power?

I'll leave that for you to make up your
own minds about.

But I think
we can be sure of one thing: trying to stop terrorism by overwhelming violence
is not going to work."

To quote
Professor Geering again: "The plan to stamp out terrorism by waging war
is like trying to cure measles by attempting the wash the spots off by using
the most powerful detergent available. The spots are simply the symptom of
the disease. Terrorism is the symptom of a deep malaise, a malaise that lies
behind the current responses to terrorism as much as behind terrorism itself."

What answers
does our faith and our tradition have to all of this?

6.

Arthur Waskow,
you will remember, started off with the Passover Haggadah, the re-telling
and re-interpreting of the Exodus story that Jewish people engage in every
year, in the most important of their festivals.

His response
to Pharaoh, whatever shape modern Pharaohs may take, is to say:

"It is not
to simply name the Pharaoh of our times; as both the Bible and the Haggadah
instruct us, we must seize the calling and challenge to move from slavery
to freedom today. We must not be content to simply re-tell the story; we must,
as part of this great tradition of struggle for justice and compassion, live
the story.

As followers
of Jesus Christ, we stand in the same tradition. In the Gospels, Matthew in
particular sees Jesus as the new and greater Moses, the one who in turn leads
his people from captivity to freedom.

I think we
can see a Christian response as resting on a double foundation:

1. Our response
to the Pharaohs of our time must be founded on Resurrection faith. The love
that Jesus showed was so great that it could not be conquered, even by death.
Sadly most of us Christians settle for much less. The distorted face of Christianity
that many Muslims see has little to do with the heart of Christianity.

The call
to us Christians is to live out our resurrection faith in compassion, in understanding,
in self giving.

2. The second
part of our response has to do with creating community.

The very
first Christians were a community founded on resurrection faith. Their experience
of the Holy Spirit led them to believe in the power of that same Spirit to
make them one. They also saw, and so can we, that the Holy Spirit can spread
community well beyond our local situation. We live in a global village and
we need to learn to live together, in peace and harmony.

I'd like
to close with a prayer that was used in the opening worship of the 6th assembly
of the World Council of Churches:

Loving God,

You have
called us to be one,

to live in
unity and harmony,

and yet we
are divided:

race from
race,

7.

faith from
faith,

rich from
poor,

old from
young,

neighbour
from neighbour . . .

O Lord, by
whose cross all enmity is brought to an end,

break down
the walls that separate us,

tear down
the fences of indifference

free us from
pride and self-seeking,

overcome
our prejudices and fears,

give us courage
to open ourselves to others;

by the power
of your Spirit to make us one.

Amen

(Sermon by
Stuart Grant at Mornington and Glenaven Methodist Churches,Dunedin,